


All This and Heaven Too

by whyyesitscar



Category: Glee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 03:52:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whyyesitscar/pseuds/whyyesitscar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are the pressures of Nationals and relationships plaguing them, but sometimes they're just plain scared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All This and Heaven Too

**Author's Note:**

> Santana/Quinn/Rachel-centric, inspired by (and lyrics taken from) the Florence song of the same name. Set somewhere around 3x16.

“Rachel, you have a solo?”

Rachel gets up and hands Brad some sheet music, even though she’s shaking her head. “No,” she says.

“Okay…”

She takes a deep breath and at least half of the glee club rolls their eyes. “I realize it isn’t a disco song, but Santana, Quinn and I have prepared a trio that fully explores the nuances of longing and heartbreak—what it means not only to feel pain but to _feel feelings themselves_ …”

“Jesus Christ, Rachel,” Santana snaps. “You keep talking and I’ll make this a duet real quick.”

“You can’t back out, Santana; you have the lead verse.”

“So stop hogging all the fucking attention and let me _take_ the lead.”

“Language, Santana!” Rachel and Mr. Schue chime simultaneously. Rachel, of course, is louder.

“Is this, like, a spoken word piece? Or are you guys going to actually sing?” Brittany asks.

“We’re singing, Brittany; don’t worry,” Quinn answers. She swivels her chair as Rachel and Santana flank her. Rachel had suggested performing on stools at first, but Santana said no.

(Quinn never found the words to thank her, but Santana heard them all the same).

“I know we’ve been singing disco songs because they’re supposed to motivate us about the future,” Quinn continues, “but sometimes the future is scary and sad, too. And it might not be the best way to close out the week, but we sing out our feelings in here, and I’d bet that a lot of us are feeling something like this.”

The smiles on the faces of their fellow glee members are not ones of happiness but of solidarity. All the seniors have this look that simultaneously says “I know exactly what you’re talking about” and “Please cure my debilitating fear with your song.” The last part is wishful thinking, but at least they’re doing it together.

Mr. Schue’s smile is sad, too—like he remembers the anxiety of leaving high school—only his has the added bonus of being just a touch too patronizing. But after three years of rehearsals with him, they’ve learned to look past it.

He nods encouragingly. “Let’s hear it, ladies.”

And off they go.

 **and the heart is hard to translate—**   
**it has a language of its own;**  
 **it talks in tongues and quiet sighs and prayers and proclamations,**  
 **in the grand days of great men and the smallest of gestures,**  
 **in short shallow gasps.**

**_1._ **

Santana has been brought up in a very logical household.

_(“Chew slowly, Santana; you don’t want to choke on your food.”_

_“Get that history grade up—you want to get into a good college, don’t you?”_

_“Cheer practice hurts now but think how grateful you’ll be when you’re seventy and healthy.”)_

She understands bullet points and lists; the empiricism of chemistry and algebra (but never quantum physics or geometry). She likes cause and effect, organized essays that come to concise conclusions. Santana likes things that are clearly spelled out. She doesn’t have time for riddles.

Brittany was a riddle right from the start. Brittany was imaginary numbers and dimensional theories and the inexplicable reasoning behind eight-packs of hot dogs but six-packs of buns.

It wasn’t like they understood each other right away. Santana actually tried her hardest _not_ to understand Brittany. Brittany was bouncy and weird and sometimes Santana would be annoyed with her for absolutely no reason. There were a lot of times freshman year that she wanted to dismantle everything Brittany said. Just, like, sit her down for a nice, blunt conversation about how Brittany was seriously misguided.

_“It isn’t that you’re wrong, Brittany. Well, except you sort of are. But that’s not bad. It’s just that the world doesn’t work how you think it does, and it would really be better if you’d understand that.”_

So Brittany was weird and Santana was annoyed and Quinn was laughing.

But Santana was also only human, and when Brittany showed up at cheer camp the summer before sophomore year and put all of them to shame, something changed. Santana had reason to be around Brittany a lot more and she started to see things she hadn’t before.

Things like how Shannon Hoffman’s cheeks really did puff out like a chipmunk’s when she got frustrated. Or how if Santana focused on some person in the bleachers, like Brittany said, she wouldn’t have to worry about coming down straight on a jump. Her body would kind of just do it by itself.

(Or how the gibberish that Brittany spouted off when she was upset wasn’t really gibberish. At the end of six weeks, Santana had learned a whole new language.)

She still doesn’t always understand Brittany. There are times when Santana cocks her head in confusion just like everyone else. But, unlike everyone else, the thing about Santana is that she is always ready to learn. It’s like when you throw a ball for a dog—the dog doesn’t need to know how you throw it. It just needs to go find the ball. Santana doesn’t always need to know how Brittany comes to the conclusions that she does. She just needs to be able to figure out what to do with them afterwards. Santana loves learning how things work. She likes knowing how each different part of something affects it as a whole. But Brittany is teaching her to see the bigger picture, to see not how the parts create the sum, but how the sum is just another part of something even bigger. It’s not any kind of thinking that Santana is used to, but she’ll be fluent in it one day. She has her parents to blame for that, probably.

_(“Whatever you do, Santana—master it. Be the best. You must excel.”)_

Santana is determined to excel at Brittany. It’s a slow learning curve because there is a lot that distracts Brittany from teaching (Santana, dancing, cats, Santana), and sometimes Santana can find a million reasons why she can’t learn (fear, fear, fear, hope). But Santana doesn’t really plan on quitting. Every time she thinks she’s reached the final exam, Brittany tells her about something else she needs to know. And slowly—agonizingly, exhaustingly, beautifully slowly—Santana is working on turning her short, shallow, seventeen-year-old gasps into long, satisfied sighs.

 **but with all my education**   
**I can't seem to commend it,**  
 **and the words are all escaping me**  
 **and coming back all damaged.**  
 **and I would put them back in poetry**   
**if I only knew how.**  
 **I can't seem to understand it.**

**_2._ **

When she was little, Lucy Fabray loved to read stories. Fairy tales, mostly. She read all about Snow White and Cinderella and Pinocchio. Lucy especially loved Pinocchio. She liked the idea of someone’s entire life being based around truth, mostly because hers wasn’t. Lucy tried to be Pinocchio—she tried to be brave, truthful, and unselfish—but as soon as she stepped outside her books, it went away.

(Brave, truthful, and unselfish, Lucy offered, and Russell Fabray answered back with a demand of pretty, pretty, pretty.)

But the truth, of course, was the problem. The truth was that Lucy was fat. Lucy Fabray had a too-large nose, too-brown hair, and not enough courage. So she became a puppet, let her father dress her up and dote on her and turn her into the perfect daughter. She was every bit a string-less marionette, and sometimes, when Quinn walked down the halls of McKinley or sat in her living room or let Finn drive her to the movies, she wondered why her head didn’t tip forward from all the extra weight. It felt like her nose was seven feet long, and it never stopped growing.

(Everything in her life was a whale, you see. It just kept swallowing her and swallowing her and sometimes, Quinn would be reunited with Lucy down in the belly of the beast. But every time they wanted out, she had to give up more of herself to burn).

When Lucy left, so did Jiminy, and Quinn just kept letting con men take her places. Sometimes she was the con man. There weren’t any schemes that Quinn was tricked by more than the ones she created for herself. And never let it be said that she wasn’t good at creating them. She found tattoo parlors and crappy hair dye and gloriously seedy bars two towns over where no one asked her questions. Funny, that in a bar full of lies, Quinn suddenly felt like telling the truth.

(She did, a little bit. When a dirty twenty-something with stubble that she couldn’t really distinguish from dirt asked her what her name was, she said Quinn. It was the first time it had ever really felt like her name, even if, at the moment she said it, she was halfway to not remembering it at all. But maybe that was the best part. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to be the Quinn who wore nice dresses or the one with bad dye jobs. Maybe the right Quinn was still lingering in the space between cardigans and ironic tattoos. Maybe that explains why Lucy always wanted to be Pinocchio and Jiminy at the same time).

When she gets hit by the truck, Quinn can really only laugh at the irony. She spends her days lying in her hospital bed, connected to machines and IV drips and she really only moves when other people tell her to. A puppet again, only this time the strings attached to her hands move too slowly and the ones attached to her legs don’t even work.

She’s relearning to walk, relearning what it means to have parts beneath her waist.

(It isn’t all sex and mechanics like people focus on. It’s shifting so your friend can lean against you on the couch. It’s getting up from a picnic blanket without pushing off your hands. It’s jumping the last few steps on a staircase just because you can.)

Quinn practices every day but she doesn’t tell anyone (except for Joe, but only him because he doesn’t know her). When she gets better, when her legs wake up—laughing—and ask her if they can go running, then she’ll let everyone else know.

If she’s going to walk again for everyone, it will be with legs that Quinn was always supposed to have. It will be with arms that know where they’re supposed to go. It will be with a head that knows where it’s supposed to look, with eyes that see everything they should have before.

 _Make me a real girl_ , she wishes every day, and every day she gets closer to that truth.

 **and it talks to me in tiptoes**   
**and sings to me inside.**  
 **it cries out in the darkest night**  
 **and breaks in morning light.**

**_3._ **

There is a song in her heart all the time. She wakes up to singing, practices solos while eating her gluten-free cereal with almond milk, sings the periodic table because chemistry is impossible sometimes, and goes to bed to the soundtrack of her favorite ballads. If she could sing in her sleep, she would.

(Sometimes Rachel thinks that’s what dreams are, and she wishes every morning that she could remember the notes of fleeting nighttime fancies.)

It’s strongest at night. In the daylight, under the harsh Ohio sun her song is beaten down, cracked and leathery from too much wear.

But in New York…well, she won’t have to forget her dreamsongs in the city that never sleeps, right?

 **and I would give all this and heaven, too!**  
 **I would give it all if only for a moment**  
 **that I could just understand the meaning of the word, you see.**  
 **'cause I've been scrawling it forever,** **  
but it never makes sense to me at all.**

(They get smiles and applause. Brittany hugs Santana; Artie pats Quinn’s knee in solidarity. Finn nods at Rachel and slings an arm around her. He doesn’t understand.

None of them do, really, but the silence broken by awkward throat-clearing and averted eyes lets them know that everyone gets it.)


End file.
